Books published in France have famously boring covers, but the Babel series of paperbacks from Actes Sud is a pleasant exception. I bought this novel more or less entirely on the strength of the Audrey Kawasaki artwork on the front – well, that and the title. The author, Muriel Cerf, was still alive when I got the book in 2011; having just finished it (after finding it half-read in a box), I now discover that Cerf has died in the interim, aged just 61.

She was a Hot New Talent in the 70s, after which she sadly spent most of her career trying to repeat the huge success of her first book, a Malrucian travelogue called L' Antivoyage (1974). But she was producing work continually until the end – and still selling – with a writing style characterised by its fascination with intense emotions and sexual obsession, gifts which are well deployed in this novel.

It takes place mostly in the paranoiac imagination of Gilles Morgenstern, whose wife Ariane has disappeared for a weekend with a female friend – a trip which Gilles is convinced heralds the start of a lesbian love-affair in which Ariane can find all the sexual fulfilment she never got from her marriage. The tone is pitched somewhere between Jewish humour and languorous sexual reminiscence – rather as though Woody Allen had adapted volume four-ish of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Proust is, indeed, a presiding spirit over the book – Gilles treasures his earliest memory of his wife as his own petite madeleine, and Ariane herself is introduced as a proustienne incurable. And there are the long sentences – though here the idea is more about capturing the nervous flurries of Gilles's train of thought, often hilariously-over-the-top, as in the memory of a teenage Ariane eating an ice-cream:

…voir comment, avec une langue dardée de crotale (cette nymphette est un animalier à elle toute seule), Ariane D. arase spire par spire la froide ziggourat sucrée qui lui fond dans la glotte, oh mon Dieu, se dit-il, la fellation doit être quelque chose du même genre – et il ferme les yeux pour mieux voir la fillette ne dévaster qu'une glace lorsque sous ses paupières la petite langue s'attaque, papillonnante, puis insistante et doucereusement lente et lourde, sur une verge dont elle sait tout les replis….

which I will leave demurely (and lazily) untranslated. I should point out that she's only 13 here and frequently classified as a nymphette – and need I specify that Nabokov is another huge looming presence behind the narrative? And he and Proust aren't the only ones. Like a late Russell Hoban novel, there is a vast proliferation of artists and artworks that the novel references and draws on, including:

Literature
Colette's La Chatte
Shakespeare's Othello and A Midsummer Night's Dream
Ibsen's A Doll's House
Albert Cohen's Solal and Belle du Seigneur
Henry Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy
The Story of O
Petrarch
‘Proust, toujours Proust’

Film
The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder)
La Grande Bouffe (Ferreri)
Gilda (Charles Vidor)
The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick)
Buñuel
Luchino Visconti

Art
Hokusai's The Great Wave
Courbet's The Origin of the World
Ingres's The Turkish Bath
Rubens's Venus Frigida
Nicolas de Staël

Music
Gigliola Cinquetti's Non ho l'età
Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel
Francis Cabrel's Je l'aime à mourir
Bob Marley's Get up, Stand up
Bach's St John Passion and Goldberg Variations
Nicoletta
Bobby Solo

And I like books that do this very much, you have the feeling that you're being given access to this shared world that's been jointly created by every artist and writer and filmmaker that's ever lived. It is interesting too to see a female writer applying herself so assiduously to inhabiting the male gaze, with long voyeuristic descriptions of Ariane, her underwear, and her imagined frolics with her girlfriend, that manage to be beautiful, ludicrous, sexy, silly, hilarious and moving, somehow all at once.

‘Women are capable of anything – they can have ten orgasms in a row and then go and repaint the ceilings afterwards,’ frets Gilles, shuffling through his wife's copies of Cosmo. It must be super fun for a woman to write a male character like this, and I must say I found it much less annoying here than when I read Portnoy's Complaint (with which this book has some similarities).

It's lightweight perhaps, but it's got some lush descriptions, lots of ironic perving, several good jokes – and a delicious sense of its own literary and artistic ancestry. ( )